Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely read book in modern African literature. His novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era.
About Chinua Achebe in brief
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely read book in modern African literature. His novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He was a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990, after a car crash left him partially disabled. He also published a large number of short stories, children’s books, and essay collections. He died in 2009 at the age of 87. He is survived by his wife, three children, and a stepson and two grandchildren. His books include The Pilgrim’s Progress and an Igbo version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as a prose adaptation of Aidsummer’s Dream and Night of the Moths. The Achebes are buried in the town of Akpaka in the state of Anambra, where he was born and grew up. The family moved to Ogidi, his ancestral town, when he was a young boy. He had five surviving children, named in a similar fusion of traditional words relating to their new religion: Frank Okwuofu, John Chukwuemeka Ifeanyichukwu, Zinobia Uzoma, Augustine Ndubisi, and Grace Nwanneneka.
His parents were converts to the Protestant Church Mission Society in Nigeria. His unabbreviated name, Chinualumogu, was a prayer for divine protection and stability. He stopped practicing the religion of his ancestors, but he respected its traditions. His mother and sister told him many stories as a child, which he later recreated in his novels and stories. In 1936, he entered St Philips’ Central School in the region of Central Akpogu. He won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. His later novels include No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah. He wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a language of colonisers, in African literature, in 1975, in a lecture on Joseph Conrad. In 1975, his lecture featured a criticism of Conrad as \”a thoroughgoing racist\”; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy. In 1990, he began an eighteen-year tenure at Bard College as the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature. From 2009 until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.
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